Find Good In All Bad
Welcome to Confused To Confident Where Good Can Be Found In Bad
Hello all you wonderful women. It’s great to have you here this second week of my blog posts. Thank you so much for all the good feedback last week, I really am thankful to have followers who are willing to get involved. It lets me know you are ready to take charge of your life, which is a good thing!
Today we are going to expand on the idea, that there are no mistakes, and start looking for the good in seemingly bad situations. For those of you who didn’t read the post on mistakes last week, you may want to check it out here. It relates to this same concept of finding the good in what seems bad.
More...
Things happen in life, some we perceive as good, some as bad, and some as horrible. The most important thing to remember is, we determine if something is good or bad. It’s our thoughts and beliefs that make something good or bad.
For example
Say one morning you were running late and you missed your bus to work. As you waited at the bus stop, fretting about how you were missing a meeting and wondering how you were going to get everything done being an hour late, the new good-looking neighbor, that you had been wanting to make a connection with, pulls up and asks if you want a ride. You can focus on the fact that you missed your meeting and are behind for the morning, which are not good things (unless of course you don’t like meetings and find them a waste of time anyway), OR you can focus on the good aspect of getting to meet the new neighbor.
Of course, not all things that seem bad are as easy to find something good in them as the example above, but if you really try to step out of the situation and look at it from a different perspective, you can usually find some good that can come out of it.
Here's a tougher example
Most people would find it very difficult to say there is anything good in a child disappearing yet, when 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered, her mother made sure good came out of it.
It would've been easy for Amber's mother to have gotten dragged down by the bad of the incident. Many of us would be so devastated, in seeing only what horror had happened, that we would hardly be able to function. Amber's mother didn't do that however, she saw how she could make the bad situation into something good. She inspired the AMBER Alert.
In the last ten years over 800 children were rescued because of the AMBER alert program (www.amberalert.gov). It will always be a loss for Amber’s family yet something very good came out of the loss. Hundreds of children have been saved because of the loss of Amber yet her mother wouldn’t have been motivated to promote a program to help save children unless she had lost her own.
I'm sure Amber's mother is finding some comfort knowing that the loss of her daughter is saving hundreds of other children. That's the idea of this post. Looking to find some good in your bad situations will help them seem less bad. You may even be able to find humor in them as my daughter did in her very bad day.
You can check out my daughter's very bad day, and how I helped her see the good in all the bad situations, in the video, or text, after the activity.
This week's activity will help you change how you think about the things that don't go as planned.
Activity - Bad to Good
It’s easier to make light of the situation when it isn't our situation. This activity is short but it may take some practice. If you need help, be sure to post it in the comments so the community can help you to see the problem from an outside perspective.
Step 1
Think of one bad thing that has happened to you. It can be something recent or something that has been bothering you for a while.
Step 2
Imagine a friend coming to you with that very problem. Think about you sitting down to lunch and them struggling to get out how confused and upset they are about the problem.
Step 3
What would you say to them? How would you comfort them? Would you have possible solutions? Is it one of those things an outsider would laugh about? What could you do to help them feel less bad about the situation?
Step 4
Write down your answers from Step 3. I'm sure you've figured out, those are the same things you can tell yourself.
By making the problem someone else's, it's easier to see some of the good that can come out of it.
Warning
If you have others that you often share with, you need to be careful about using them as a sounding board. We usually pick friends that have the same viewpoints as we do. If your friends just get bogged down in your pity party, the process won't work well. You want positive input or none at all.
Laughing At A Very Bad Day
I’m going to tell you of my daughter’s really bad day.
Lost Opportunity
Her day started off with her getting up late and having to rush to make a meeting. It was an important meeting, she was negotiating a long-term sponsorship with a major corporation. Since she had been rushed and was feeling stressed, her presentation lacked the conviction needed to get the corporation on board long term. They did, however, offer her a one time $4,000 grant and promised to keep an eye on the organization for possible future sponsorship. She totally discounted what she did accomplish and focused on the fact that she didn’t get the long-term commitment. This left her grumbly the rest of the day.
Lost Car
The next setback came when she arrived back home and couldn’t find her car in the airport parking lot. We both were flying out the same day so I had driven to the airport. She had been on her phone and didn’t pay attention to where I was parking. When she got to the airport parking lot, she walked around clicking her key fob listening for her car to beep. It took her nearly half an hour of clicking before she could determine where the sound of her horn was coming from. Of course she focused on the frustration of not being able to find her car rather than the good thing that she had a car new enough to beep when you push the key button. She could have had to walk every floor, row by row to find her car. That could have taken hours.
No Gas
Once she found her car and started it, she remembered it was nearly out of gas. Already being frustrated about walking around in the heat to find her car, this only irritated her more. She composed herself enough to use her phone to find the nearest gas station, which was only a couple miles away. When she got there, however, they were out of business. Nearly in tears by this time, she searched and found another one nearby. She did get there and filled up with gas before she ran out. Again, her focus stayed on the negative; she almost ran out of gas and the first gas station was closed. She totally missed the good in the fact that she didn’t run out of gas. She also had a phone that helped her find close gas stations and they weren't in a dangerous neighborhoods.
Dead Battery
Later, when she picked me up from the airport, in just the few minutes it took to come in and get me, her battery died and her car wouldn’t start. Like I told you in last week's post, just as we were getting the number for AAA, a service truck pulled up to the car beside us to help the guy change a tire. The service guy had us started in less than five minutes. On top of that, there was no charge, yet my daughter focused on it being just another bad thing that happened.
Finding The Good
As she was telling me her woes for the day, I couldn’t help but thinking there seemed to be a pattern. For everything bad that happened, there had been something good that went along with it, yet my daughter was so focused on the negative she couldn’t see the positive in each situation. When she started complaining that she would now have to spend money for a new battery, I had to stop her.
I started with the fact that she HAD the money to be able to go out and get a new battery. For many people this could be a huge financial burden. They may not even be able use their vehicle until they got their next paycheck. They may not have any money to buy the battery until then. Then I pointed out all the other positives that came with each "bad" situation.
Thankfully, once I pointed out all the good things, she was able to redirect her focus from the bad to the good. She ended up actually laughing at it all. Sometimes things keep happening until you get the message being given (I will go into this more in a future post.) I think my daughter’s message that day was to look for the good in life. That's a good message for all of us to remember.